egca shortened

Micklin (2007)

• Primary account of Aral Sea desiccation causes and consequences

• Identifies Soviet irrigation diversion of Amu Darya and Syr Darya as the primary driver of collapse

Spoor (1998)

• Analyses the Aral Sea basin crisis through post-Soviet governance transition

• Argues fragmentation of the USSR into five competing states created a governance vacuum that existing institutions failed to fill

Meadowcroft (2002)

• Environmental problems are inherently scalar mismatches — ecological systems are boundaryless but governance is jurisdictional

• Political cycles (4–7 years) are structurally misaligned with ecological timescales (decades)

Brain (2010)

• Stalin's Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature (1948) was the world's first state-directed attempt to reverse human-induced environmental change

• Promethean ideology overrode technocratic concern — desiccation was a known, accepted consequence built into the ideological architecture

Peterson (2019)

• Water in the Aral Sea basin has always been an imperial resource, first under Tsarist Russia, then Soviet

• Post-Soviet governance failure is the legacy of a system never designed for equitable transboundary sharing

Nixon (2011)

• Slow violence is temporally dispersed, visually unspectacular, and structurally invisible — contrasted with immediate spectacular violence

• The Aral Sea is a representation problem: gradual harm is hard to narrate, easy for states to disavow, and systematically underrepresented

Degnen (2013)

• Social relations have ontological depth that is both spatial and temporal — the absent exerts as much influence as the present through accumulated "knowing"

• Applied to Aral Sea: the physically absent sea continues to haunt present social relations through memory, ruined infrastructure, and lost livelihoods

Park, Adibayeva & Saari (2020)

• IFAS performs institutional presence while remaining absent from actual redistribution of water rights or upstream accountability

• Upstream states prioritise hydropower; downstream states prioritise irrigation — national interests structurally prevent equitable transboundary governance

Horac & Lepic (2025)

• 2022 Karakalpakstan protests against constitutional changes removing the region's right to self-determination

• State manifests as present in suppression of protest and absent in remediation of ecological harm — paradigm case of selective state presence

Menga & Mirumachi (2016)

• Tajik government used soft power — narratives of national identity and energy security — to legitimise construction of Rogun Dam despite downstream Uzbekistan's opposition

• Demonstrates how national political-economic interests exploit transboundary governance vacuums rather than resolve them

Plotnikov et al. (2023)

General ref for Aral Sea

• Contemporary ecological assessment of Aral Sea remnants and biodiversity collapse

Zatilla et al. (2025)

• Central Asian aquatic security framing — water as a security risk rather than purely ecological issue

• Links water scarcity to regional political instability and migration pressure

Slow Violence

• Violence that is temporally dispersed, gradual, and visually unspectacular — contrasted with immediate, media-legible violence (Nixon, 2011)

• Creates a representation problem: the slow accumulation of harm is structurally invisible, making political accountability difficult

Absence-Presence

• The physically absent continues to exert relational presence through accumulated knowing, memory, and ruination (Degnen, 2013)

• Not a binary — absence and presence co-constitute each other across spatial and temporal depth

Ontological Depth

• Social relations extend backwards through time and outwards through space in ways that outlast physical co-presence (Degnen, 2013)

• Means governance cannot address only what is materially present — it must grapple with what is absent and what that absence means to communities

Hydraulic Society

• Wittfogel's concept: states that control large-scale water infrastructure develop centralised, authoritarian governance structures (Wheeler, 2019)
• USSR treated the Aral Sea basin as a single hydraulic unit — post-Soviet fragmentation into five states dismantled this without replacing it

Sacrifice Zone

• A region rendered expendable by state or capital in service of extraction elsewhere

• Karakalpakstan as paradigm case — ecological collapse accepted as the cost of Soviet cotton production

IFAS

• International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea, established 1993 by five Central Asian states

• Structurally ineffective — financing routes through national governments with competing upstream/downstream interests; performs cooperation without delivering it

Soviet Cotton Programme

• 1950s–80s diversion of Amu Darya and Syr Darya for cotton monoculture reduced the Aral Sea to approximately 10% of its original volume

• Desiccation was a known, accepted consequence — Brain (2010): Promethean ideology overrode ecological concern

Karakalpakstan

• Autonomous region of Uzbekistan bearing the greatest ecological and public health burden of desiccation

• Chronic respiratory illness, water insecurity, collapsed fisheries — Horac & Lepic (2025): state present in suppression, absent in remediation

SKWRMIP

• South Karakalpakstan Water Resources Management Improvement Project, World Bank, 2014–2021, $273 million

• Technocratic irrigation modernisation that mirrors Soviet top-down logic while blaming Soviet approaches — does not address cotton monoculture as root cause (World Bank PAD329, 2014)

Rogun Dam

• Tajikistan's flagship hydropower project, fiercely opposed by downstream Uzbekistan
• Menga & Mirumachi (2016): Tajik government deployed soft power and national identity narratives to legitimise construction — national interests override transboundary ecological governance

2022 Karakalpakstan Protests

• Mass protests against constitutional amendments removing Karakalpakstan's right to self-determination

• Horac & Lepic (2025): state violence deployed against protesters while ecological remediation remains absent — paradigm case of selective state presence/absence

Huber (1991)

• Founding text of EM theory — "the dirty and ugly industrial caterpillar will transform into an ecological butterfly" through super-industrialisation

• Argues technological innovation can decouple economic growth from ecological degradation without dismantling capitalism

Harvey (1993)

• "All ecological projects and arguments are simultaneously political-economic projects and arguments and vice versa"

• Transformation of nature is always driven by social power relations and economic needs — ecology and political economy are constitutively inseparable

Hajer (1995)

• EM is both a theory and a discourse — it defines what counts as a legitimate environmental problem and solution

• Discursive power means EM performs political work independent of material results, systematically favouring state and elite interests

Mol & Spaargaren (2000)

• Distinguishes weak EM (technocratic fixes within capitalism) from strong EM (institutional reform, democratic inclusion, global justice)

• Argues ecological rationalisation can become an autonomous force restructuring modern institutions

Robbins (2011)

• Political ecology: there is no apolitical account of environmental degradation
• Environmental problems are always produced through social power relations — depoliticisation is itself a political act

Scott (1998)

• High modernism: states impose legible, technocratic order on complex social and ecological systems, systematically ignoring local vernacular knowledge
• Explains why top-down EM projects in Central Asia reproduce rather than resolve the conditions they claim to address

Agrawal (2005)

• Environmentality: governance produces environmental subjects — people who internalise environmental norms and self-regulate
• EM creates subjects who accept responsibility for environmental problems produced by structural conditions

Arnstein (1969)

• Ladder of participation: citizen participation ranges from manipulation at the bottom to citizen control at the top
• Most EM governance operates in the middle rungs — tokenistic consultation rather than genuine democratic deliberation

Ostrom (1990)

• Governing the commons through collective institutional arrangements — challenges both state control and market solutions
• Offers an alternative to EM's market-state partnership model, emphasising community-based governance of shared resources

Manzano et al. (2026)

• Pastoralists blamed for methane emissions causing climate change — shifting blame from industrial agriculture to subsistence communities
• Paradigm case of absence-presence: state and capital absent from accountability, present in responsibilising the rural poor

Ecological Modernisation

• Theory and policy paradigm arguing environmental protection and economic growth are compatible through technological innovation and institutional reform (Huber, 1991)

• Weak EM: technocratic fixes within capitalism. Strong EM: democratic institutional reform and global justice

Win-Win Logic

• EM's core claim that ecology and economy can be simultaneously advanced through innovation-oriented environmental policy (Jänicke & Lindemann, 2010)

• Hajer (1995): the win-win is a discourse of reassurance — it performs compatibility rather than demonstrating it

Green Neoliberalism

• Combination of environmental greening and market globalisation that prioritises market tools over fundamental ecosystem health (Goldman, 2005)

• Ecological language used to maintain political-economic control and extraction rather than relinquish it

Depoliticisation

• EM frames environmental problems as technical and managerial, silencing radical social critique and sidelining democratic deliberation

• Hajer (1995): consensus built among elites substitutes for democratic accountability

Discourse of Reassurance

• EM's political function — makes environmental action feel achievable without demanding radical social transformation (Hajer, 1995)

• Allows states and corporations to perform environmental governance while maintaining existing power structures

Projectification

• The conversion of environmental governance into discrete, time-limited, internationally-funded projects
• Temporal complexity: project timelines (3–7 years) structurally misaligned with ecological timelines (decades) and political timelines

Responsibilisation

• Foucauldian concept: the state withdraws from structural responsibility and reframes problems as individual behaviour and choice
• In EM context: communities blamed for ecological harm they are structurally compelled to produce

Fukuda (2017)

• UB's air pollution is a contested political construct — global experts define the problem in ways that spatialise harm and responsibilise the urban poor
• Scientific metrics (PM2.5) locate pollution at the point of emission (ger stoves) rather than tracing structural causes (energy poverty, infrastructure exclusion)

Plueckhahn (2021)

• Infrastructure access in UB is characterised by heterogeneous infrastructural configurations (HICs) — the connected/disconnected binary is a myth

• Environmental stigma: ger residents are blamed for pollution they are structurally forced to produce because centralised heating infrastructure excludes them

Byambadorj, Amati & Runing (2011)

• Ger districts and barriers to the UB City Master Plan — in-migration concentrated in new peripheral ger districts, not established ones

• Densification targeted at long-standing communities is spatially misaligned with the actual source of growing pollution

Anderson, Hooper & Tuvshinbat (2017)

• Compact city plans and local perceptions of urban densification in UB

• Local residents perceive densification as exclusionary — affordability gap means high-rise development prices out the low-income residents it claims to help

Davies (2019)

• Slow violence and toxic geographies: "out of sight to whom?" — toxic harm is invisible to those with power to act, not to those experiencing it

• Extends Nixon: slow violence is a structural feature of how governance is organised, not just a representational failure

Skotnicki (2019)

• Unseen suffering: slow violence and the phenomenological structure of social problems
• Gradual harm becomes naturalised and invisible through the phenomenological structure of everyday experience

McFarlane (2020)

• De/re-densification: a relational geography of urban density — density is not a neutral technical metric but a political construction
• Who gets to define what counts as too dense, and whose density is treated as a problem to be solved?

Heterogeneous Infrastructural Configurations (HICs)

• Plueckhahn (2021): the reality of infrastructure access in UB — residents are neither simply connected nor disconnected but differentially incorporated into systems of provision
• Some residents access electricity but not heating; others access heating intermittently — porosity rather than binary inclusion/exclusion

Environmental Stigma

• Plueckhahn (2021): ger residents are marked as polluters because their coal burning is visually legible, while inadequacies of the centralised system are invisible
• Stigma justifies withholding infrastructure investment, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of exclusion and blame

Densification

• Urban planning strategy concentrating population in high-density housing to reduce per-capita energy consumption and enable centralised infrastructure provision
• Steelman: thermodynamically efficient, precondition for equitable infrastructure access. Critique: spatially misaligned, displaces established communities, affordability gap

UB Coal Dependency

• Three ageing coal-fired power plants supply centralised heating to apartment buildings; coal provides 90%+ of Mongolia's electricity demand

• Mongolia's Minister of Environment (2023): "Fully phasing out coal is almost impossible in the near future" — coal dependency is multi-scalar, national and household simultaneously

UB 6% Annual Growth Rate

• UB population growing at approximately 6% per year since 1990 driven by rural-urban in-migration

• In-migration concentrated in new peripheral ger districts — densification targeted at long-standing established communities is spatially misaligned with the pollution problem

Asian Development Bank UB Loans

• Program 1 ($130m): regulatory framework improvement. Program 2 ($160m): 80,000 tons of briquettes, boiler replacement, insulation in schools and hospitals

• Refined coal briquettes (2019): 8 people died and 1,000 hospitalised from carbon monoxide poisoning — inadequate knowledge transfer, weak EM in practi

Gotov (2010)

General ref for pollution